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So I’ve been a teacher for 23 years at this point, and a casual multilingual for a similar amount of time. I’ve been thinking about the following topic since the 90s, but have been afraid to try to explain it, since monolinguals are often such babies.

Second language learners and monolinguals often accuse people speaking other languages of talking too fast. “Slow down! Please! You talk too fast!” How inconsiderate of you, to not speak at a pace that I dictate. You people (of a different culture) have a problem, and my needs, as the outsider, must be placed at the center of this exchange.

Listen, these cross-linguistic studies about words per minute, and syllables per minute were done years ago. There’s a ton of them but I’ll just link to publications with the most authoritative sounding title; so here’s Scientific American and Psychology Today. Both articles explain that all over the world, different languages exchange information at about the same rate; nobody is actually giving information faster or slower than anyone else. Spanish and Japanese might have slightly more syllables per minute, and Mandarin and German might have fewer syllables per minute, but if you look at Mandarin and German syllables they are denser with information; in the end, no one culture is exchanging information faster than the other.

Yes, there are exceptions; excited teenagers, coke heads, etc. But the remarks I hear are rarely about a coke head; instead they are about entire cultures. I’ve heard: Spanish speakers talk too fast! French people talk too fast! Chinese people TALK TOO FAST (um, Scientific American just said they have the fewest syllables per minute…).

My students regularly tell me I’m talking too fast. I’m not. I’m talking normal speed. When I show a video, they throw themselves on the floor and say OMG WHY ARE THEY TALKING SO FAST. I can hear with my own freaking ears that they’re not talking fast at all.

Get up off the floor. They are not talking too fast. You don’t understand anything due to the fact that you have THROWN YOURSELF ON THE FLOOR. You stopped listening. You. You did that. You stopped listening, and now you’re complaining about them.

Here’s what’s happening:

They’re not talking fast; you are understanding slow. You are at a stage where you cannot process normal speed human communication. That’s normal, it’s not your fault. But it is YOUR problem to deal with, not theirs; stop accusing them of being abnormal. They are treating you they way they treat everyone else. You want them to baby talk you? The least you can do is ask politely. Could you please baby talk me? Can you please stop treating me like the adult you think I am, and instead infantilize me? Go ahead and use all your baby stereotypes, I love that.

They’re not talking fast; they are talking in paragraphs. It feels fast to you, because you’re slow to process, but you’ll notice that even when they baby talk you in paragraphs, you still get lost.

But I need it, you say, I need slow speech! That would be a great argument… Actually, no; it’s not, restating that you need something is a terrible argument. When you actually get people to slow talk you, one of two things happens: a) they baby talk you and it’s condescending and they stop taking your seriously as a person, or b) they slow motion talk to you, which DOESN’T HELP YOU UNDERSTAND. If you don’t speak Chinese, no amount of slow Chinese is going to help you understand. If you don’t know the words, hearing them at half speed doesn’t help you; no amount of slowing or shouting or repeating the same word at them excitedly is going to connect the dots in your brain.

So just go home and give up.

Or you can try to negotiate for meaning.

Interrupt politely and ask a question, hear the answer and repeat it.

Interrupt and try to repeat what they said; check for confirmation.

Interrupt and try to paraphrase them, check for confirmation.

Interrupt and request clarification, “what was that word?” Hear it and repeat it.

Interrupt and ask them to repeat what they said. Hear it and repeat it.

These are all communication strategies that forgo you accusing them of being abnormal that don’t require slow motion or condescending baby talk. You’ll notice that they are all appropriate strategies in a regular conversation in your native language. People talk to you in paragraphs all the time in your native language; you already have the strategies to disrupt the stream of information a little so that you can manage it.

What if you’re in a conversation where interrupting would be impolite? Oooh that’s a tough one. Let me suggest this; if you’re in a situation so formal that interrupting would be rude, then accusing that person of talking too fast is also rude. Maybe be a different kind of rude. Or maybe stick to familiar register social interactions for the time being; stick with allies who know you better and are familiar with how you fast you process information, and can comfortably adjust for your level. Maybe just smile and survive it, and keep your coke-head accusations to yourself.

Like this:

A few years ago I blogged about how to choose which language to study. Part I dealt with vision; who are you trying to be, which language are you speaking in the future? Part II was about which language is the most practical language, since people seem to be extremely horny for whatever is practical. In Part III I try to address the easy language, for those people who just want to skip to “the end,” fluency, free sodas, and recreational drugs. I am being sarcastic.

The thing that sucks the joy out of me is that many people aren’t looking for the easy language, or the practical language, or the language they can see themselves speaking in the best, most adventurous versions of themselves. Instead, they’re looking for the lazy language. The root of that is the ridiculous assumption that language learning is both painful and impossible, which seems like a strange thing, I don’t know why people keep choosing it.

By the way, should we just say it? Should we just say, “Spanish is the easy language for Americans!” Great. Listen, if I open up my Chinese textbook to a vocabulary list of any particular chapter, I find a list of about a dozen or so vocabulary words for the chapter, more or less. When I open my Spanish textbook to a vocabulary page for a chapter, I find six dozen vocabulary words. Which language is easy; which language is lazy? Is learning 15 unfamiliar things harder than learning 72 less unfamiliar things? Why does that question even make sense to you?

Here are a couple of videos I’ve made to help recruit students into my programs. The first one, I made in 2015 when I was trying to get students to sign up for Mandarin at Seattle Prep. Here’s the higher quality version. If that’s not working for some reason, here’s a youtube copy:

Now it’s 2018, and I’m at Xavier College Prep, and we made one for the whole language department. Here’s the original link, but the youtube version is here:

Doing the video in the target languages wasn’t my idea, but I thought we’d try it out. I was a little worried that it would spook the monolinguals, but so far it seems ok. The next one I do will be even better.

Like this:

When your last class is over and you dismiss the students and tell them to GET OUT and you pull your bowtie open and then grow to the size of a five story apartment block, bursting through the science labs, the art room, through the spanish mission roof tiles and you start stepping through the crumbling building with your horned, green-scaled feet and unleashing murderous window-piercing reptilian screams and finally gathering speed, running through the sleepy town crushing each building as if they were paper nests in a meadow of tall grass, leaving footprints of destruction, death, sirens, burst fire hydrant geysers, and gas mains exploding into hot jets of flame; mountains of ruins where your armored tail swept city blocks aside as you turned to check your bearings, the smell of exhaust fumes and freedom.

Like this:

I feel like I have some students and friends whose policy is to ignore the accent marks in Spanish. If I tell them, “copy this word: más” they will write the letters “m.a.s.” When I ask them why they didn’t copy the á with a tilde over it, they will either burst into tears or immediately attack me with a punch to the neck.

Look, I don’t care about proper Spanish. It is my job to teach it to students, but in life my friends write me however they want, I don’t go after them, they’re my friends. I do, however tell my students they should learn how to write them, because a) it’s not hard and b) there are people who will write them off as pochos. I, as their teacher, wish them success and wish that other people didn’t write them off as pochos.

I tried to be gentle about it, but I had to start bringing the hammer down when they were writing like “mi familia es muy orgullosa de ser de Mexico” (sic). Folks, you’re not really representing pride in Mexico if you’re writing me-HEE-co in Spanish. In Spanish you have to write “México.” A huevo.

I know that this is an issue with heritage Spanish speakers, the accent mark looks arbitrary to them, and they go into shame spirals when someone exposes them. I’m not trying to put them there. So I tried to develop helpful graphics. Here’s the latest.

Organizador gráfico: tildes

I’m not sure if they’ll find this helpful or if it will stress them out.

The following are two examples of flow charts that I made. When I showed my latino friends, they told me, no, these two are way too stressful.

Tildes por tipo de sílaba

Tildes por tipo de palabra

This final one is organized by final letter, and my latino friends were less stressed out by this one. So I added sight gags to it and passed it out to my students. I also passed out little game chips to them, and forced them physically move the chippy along the arrows, and when they did, they got to the right answer. However they hated it (and me) with a passion and as soon as I wasn’t looking went right back to brute force guessing. Baby steps I guess.

Tildes por letra final

If anybody wants these on PDF please email me and I’ll be happy to share; or find the links on my Spanish resources page. If you’re using my material, I’d love to hear how it went over with your students.

By the way, when I learned these, it was three rules organized as bullet points in a paragraph. At this point in my career, I don’t have rules memorized, and I don’t need graphics; I just hear where accent marks are supposed to be written, even if it’s a word I never heard before. I’m still trying to figure out how to teach my students to hear where an accent mark goes. I suspect the answer will have something to do with them listening.

Like this:

Somebody asked me the other day how to say “lunch” in Spanish. Someone shouted “lonche” and someone else shouted “almuerzo.” They looked at me, and I said, “la comida.” Immediately one of the shouters snapped at me, “why do you always tell us different words?!” It wasn’t a question, it was an accusation.

My best answer; my only answer: “I’m not from here.”

Spanish in California is different from what I’m used to. To my ear it sounds like northern Mexico, plus a distinct /b/ vs. /v/ distinction that just doesn’t exist in other varieties of Spanish, apart from maybe some Gloria Estefan songs.

And of course, my Spanish is different from theirs, and I know I sound weird to them. I’m keeping a list of words that have stumped my Spanish speaking friends, colleagues, and students. Some of the words are fancy and academic-sounding, like elsimulacro and la tertulia. Some are words that I know to be common in Mexico, like piropo, nefasto, but when I say them here, people blink at me. In a conversation with my new colleagues I tried to refer to an all-boys school as todos varones, a term I learned from a colleague in 1998, and now I’m starting to think it was never the right term in the first place. What do I know?

It’s not a nice feeling to use these words and have local people blink and squint at me. I’m trying to get them to like me, and here I am with these strange words they never heard of, I feel like a jerk. Luckily my new friends are quickly getting used to me; instead of awkward vocabulary moments, they’re starting to just chuckle at me and ask me to explain my crazy word. This must be what it feels like for a speaker of Australian English to be harassed by… me. By the way, if there is a contest for the nerdiest, most dorky way to explain the word tertulia, I won it this afternoon.

On the other hand, it’s a delight for me to learn local words. The other day my friend used the word nortearse (which is definitely more charming when pronounced “nortiarse”). I understood what it meant immediately (to get disoriented, discombobulated) but it was just a surprise to hear it, because it sounds like the root word is “norte,” which cracked me up because it sounds like a comment on what happens when you go north… to the US.

My friend also took it upon herself to teach me the word chivearse, which, again, is more charming when pronounced “chiviarse” (to get embarrassed and go coy, to get flustered by a compliment). The root word is “chivo,” a kid goat; which is adorable.

So my friend says she’s going to teach me the phrase “qué bolado” tomorrow. I looked it up but I can’t wait to hear how she explains it. I told her I would take notes. She promised to teach me all of her slang, if I would teach her proper Spanish.

I’m told her I’m happy to teach her everything I know. You know, I’m thankful that I can speak Spanish and that people perceive it to be “proper.” I, personally, don’t hear my own Spanish as proper; I hear a bunch of pronunciation and grammar mistakes, fumbling for words, and awkward expressions. I think I’d much rather have native-speaker intuition and be able to tell a joke, to write a poem, to talk on the phone without anxiety, to choose concise words and make powerful and moving statements, to understand stand-up comedy, or those adivinanzas, like this one:

I understand all the words, but I don’t understand why those words are together, and I don’t get why when my coworker heard this one, she was delighted and said “that was a good one.” The answer, by the way, is “aguacate…” high fives all around.

I would take slangy, colorful native-speaker intuition over “proper Spanish” any day of the week. Besides, “proper Spanish” is just my day job; I want to leave it behind after the five o’clock whistle.

Like this:

When we study comparisons in Spanish class, I create these tournament presentations and make my students predict and comment. Here’s the first one I made, a while ago. The most important part in creating lively conversation is a little bit of injustice. I made this one back in April and forgot about it. Click here or the image above to see it!

Like this:

People love tournaments. They love making predictions, they love explaining their comparisons, and regardless of how successful they are, they love to follow along and react.

You’re thinking what I’m thinking, aren’t you… that tournament brackets are perfect for a language class. So I made one; it’s animated. Click here for all the thrills, including the final solution.

The bracket shown above is not the basketball tournament; it’s a tournament for who is my favorite singer. I could have chosen vocabulary words, but I chose celebrities instead.

There will be predictions; description, comparisons of inequality, maybe even narrations in the present past. Students will have to reconcile their own opinions with what they know of my opinions. There will be conjecture and hypotheticals, so they will have to use all kinds of future, conditional, and subjunctive tenses.

There will be reactions; expressions of victory and loss, disgust and incredulity at upsets and defeats. Also at stake: the wisdom/stupidity of whoever seeded the brackets. Subjunctive, subjunctive, subjunctive.

This motif can be repeated ad infinitum; favorite foods, favorite restaurants, favorite colors, who cares. We can use historical figures or members of the faculty and set them up as a death match… or just as easily, a niceness match; who wouldn’t want to win a niceness championship based on a Spanish class conversation topic?

Who would win the condiment tournament? Would Mayo finally face off against Miracle Whip? If there was a cute baby animal tournament, people would learn animal names in a snap.

You could even do numbers; which items, are more expensive on Amazon? Which cities in Western Washington have the highest murder rate? Who in this class has the most Twitter followers? Possibilities are endless.